Worksite wellness is certainly a hot topic today.
And you do want to make the best of your efforts, right? Here are five things to keep in mind when thinking about worksite wellness: 1.
Decide Your Program Focus (Health or Wellness?) While today's programs are called worksite wellness programs, most are in fact employee health status management programs.
The focus is only on the status of an employee's health.
While there is no standard measurement of health status, in worksite wellness programs today the employee is typically assessed and measured by an observer who performs examinations and rates the individual along any of several dimensions, including presence or absence of life-threatening illness, risk factors for premature death, severity of disease, and overall health.
Wellness is a much broader concept than health alone.
Most wellness models are multi-dimensional and consist of inter-related elements or dimensions.
The dimensions often depicted in most wellness models include: physical, emotional, social, financial, environmental, intellectual, spiritual and occupational.
You need to decide if your program will focus on employee health status or wellness.
What you decide to focus on matters.
It will determine your program's approach, programming and evaluation strategies.
2.
Decide Your Program Purpose Once you decide on your focus, you must then decide your program's purpose.
Why will your program exist? What purpose will it serve? What do you want the program to accomplish? Essentially, there are three purposes for a worksite wellness program: • To save an employer money (through cost savings or future cost avoidance) • To impact employee productivity • To help create and be a part of the employer being a best place to work.
When it comes to purpose, you want to make sure your program's purpose is reasonable, attainable and measurable.
3.
Be Data Driven and Results Focused Your program exists to accomplish your stated purpose.
It is important to understand your existing needs, gaps and available resources and how they relate to your purpose.
This requires you to complete a comprehensive needs assessment and to establish an ongoing process of data collection so you can keep yourself up to date and on track.
Everything you do should be for a stated reason and focused on your purpose.
In other words, results focused.
Your program should be about results, not just activities.
4.
Understand the Available Research Your program's framework, programming and interventions should all be based on the available evidence and not beliefs.
It is important for you to understand the existing evidence related to what makes a program effective and successful, what makes programming and interventions effective and successful, the science behind motivation, engagement and change (both individual and organizational).
5.
Create A System Recognize that employee health and wellness involve both complex and long-term initiatives that involve systematic activities.
Therefore, it is important for you to think at the systems and not program level.
Systems have a structure, with its parts all related directly or indirectly related to each other.
A system functions to achieve a function or purpose.
A system has inter-connectivity as its parts and processes are all inter-connected.
And these certainly apply to employee health and wellness.
Your system and the strategies within it need to be unique to your organization.
What is successful for the employer down the street won't necessarily be success in your organization because of the differences in organizational culture.
Culture will always trump strategy.
Your strategies need to be both short and long-term.
You also need to remember that your effectiveness and success will take time to manifest themselves and will be the result of a comprehensive approach and not from just one strategy.
If there is one key point to remember, remember that effectiveness and success come down to execution, no matter the focus and purpose of your efforts.